How to Avoid Plagiarism: 7 Steps (with Pictures)

2024 Author: Samantha Chapman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-02 02:12

Plagiarizing, or presenting someone else's ideas or works as your own, will cause you problems at all ages. Students get bad grades for plagiarism, and plagiarism contributed to Joe Biden's 1998 White House nomination failure. Here's how to make sure you're not plagiarizing, by mistake or on purpose.

Steps

Step 1. Understand what it means to plagiarize

The dictionary of Corriere della Sera defines plagiarism: "Attribution to one's own genius of someone else's work, or parts of it." Therefore by plagiarism we do not only mean a slavish copy of someone else's work, but also an imitation that is too similar. Using synonyms and choosing other words does not mean not committing plagiarism. You should always write using your own words and citing original sources.

• Original Source: "Current law prohibited slaves from demanding remuneration from their masters even for the worst crimes."

  • "Plagiarism": "The current law prevented slaves from asking their masters for damages even for the most heinous crimes."
  • "Non-plagiarism": "Even if tortured, injured or insulted, slaves could not press charges against their masters, according to the laws of the time. (Jefferson, 157)"

• You commit plagiarism if:

  • Download someone else's work from the internet;
  • Hire someone to write for you;
  • You try to make the ideas of others pass as your own.

  

  Step 2. Familiarize yourself with the topic you need to cover

  By understanding the topic, it will be easier to write in your own words than to rework what another person wrote. Do some research on the topic of interest. You can use the internet or books, and remember that books are generally more authoritative than the information you can find on the net.

  The key to avoiding plagiarism is to get your information from many different sources. If you rely on a single source, you will probably commit plagiarism and copy parts of it, even inadvertently. If, on the other hand, you rely on three books, a documentary and two original sources, you will be able to avoid plagiarism much easier

  

  Step 3. Discuss the topic with yourself a couple of times

  Try to understand the material and be able to explain it in your own words. Try to avoid reading too much material from another author, as you risk repeating his or her own words.

  • Original Source: "The slaves worked hard, 12 hours a day, from sunrise to sunset, surviving only on about 1200 calories of starch and their blood, sweat and tears."

    • Reworking: "Surviving on about half the caloric needs that are now deemed appropriate, 19th century slaves worked very long and exhausting shifts. (Jefferson, 88)"
    • Reworking: "In the 19th century, slaves worked as long as there was enough light, receiving very little food for nourishment. (Jefferson, 88)"

    

    Step 4. Cite your sources

    You must enter a bibliography at the end of your work. If you use a direct quote from another author's work, you need to learn how to do it correctly.

    One method of avoiding accidental plagiarism would be to put a quote in quotes and immediately cite the direct source. If you wait to do this at the end of the document, you risk forgetting it

    

    Step 5. If in doubt, credit the author of the original source

    There are many ways to do this and avoid plagiarism. Here are some of them:

    • Mention the source within the sentence: "According to Richard Feynman, quantum electrodynamics can be described using the formulas of the Integrals on the Paths."
    • Put special phrases in quotes that could be understood as plagiarism: "A 'paradigm shift' occurs when a scientific revolution forces the community to change its worldview."

    

    Step 6. Understand the fundamentals of copyright

    Plagiarism can be more than a bad scholastic attitude; violating copyright is a crime. Here's what you need to know to prevent this from happening:

    • As a general rule, factual data cannot be protected by copyright. This means that you can use them to support your thesis.
    • Even if the facts are not subject to copyright, the words used to express them are, especially if the words used are original or unique (copyrights cover the original expressions). You can use information found on other materials in your articles, but you will need to use your own words to express them. Don't just add a comma, it won't be enough to avoid plagiarism. In some cases, however, simply changing the grammar of the sentence will suffice.

    

    Step 7. Understand what you don't need to mention

    You don't have to mention every single thing when doing a search, or no one would bother doing research anymore. It is not necessary to mention the following elements:

    • Observations derived from common sense, proverbs, urban legends and well-known historical events.

    • Your own experiences, opinions, creations and works.

      However, if you have already used this information in a previous academically assigned document, or it may have been published, you would need to first obtain permission from your supervisor to use the material again, and once obtained, it would be necessary to include the quote about yourself

    • Your videos, your presentations, your music and other art forms created by you.

      Also in this case, the exception seen in the previous underpass applies

    • The scientific evidence you have collected from your tests, surveys, etc.

    Advice

    • Here's a tip on how to write things down in your own words. Use the Google translator to take an article and translate it into another language, for example from Italian to English. Then add an intermediate step by translating that text from English into German. Now translate it back from German to Italian. You will get incorrect Italian which will be impossible to understand. Using your knowledge on the subject you will be able to correct incorrect sentences and obtain an article written in your own words but with contents similar to the original.
    • If you are writing an article or text honestly, it is unlikely that you will be plagiarizing someone else's work. If, on the other hand, you are voluntarily copying someone's work, you will likely get caught.
    • If you decide to copy, do not copy entire pages or paragraphs!
    • If you're worried that something you've written seems to be copied by someone, it probably really is.